“I see Heaven's glories shine and Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.”

August 13

Philip Harvey on Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Christina Rossetti

 The fabled crisis of faith in 19th century English life has always to be placed beside the extraordinary manifestations of faith in the same period, whether in the progress of church and society, or at the most personal level of individual life and experience. Three poets, each of whom belonged to highly creative families, developed special ways of speaking into the whole central matter of faith, and it is their distinctive thoughts and voices we will hear in this seminar.

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) grew up in the parsonage, where free enquiry was encouraged. “I see heaven's glories shine and faith shines equal, arming me from fear,” she writes late in her short life. Restlessly and firmly, Brontë words her experience, prioritising imagination, nature, and God.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), social activist and feminist before feminism, published her first poem before she was nine. The spiritual life informs her life’s work, one of her essays stating “poetry is where God is.” When she asserts “if you desire faith, then you have faith enough,” Barrett Browning is opening a common existential reality.

Also very well-read in Scripture and theology, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) is a poet whose star has been much in the ascendent in recent times. A hard-won line goes “Obedience is the fruit of faith; patience is the early blossom on the tree of faith.” Faith, both in the sense of the virtue and of the Christian religion itself, preoccupies Rossetti throughout her writing life, and could be called its driving force even where the word ‘faith’ is not overtly used.

Philip Harvey is a widely published poet and writer. New work is regularly added to his Words blog and other sites. He recently finished 20 years as Poetry Editor of Eureka Street and his latest poetry chapbook from Honeyeater Press is entitled ‘Complete Letters’.